Video Transcript

If you’ve looked for SEO tools online, you’ll know that there are a lot out there. And like anything else online, there’s the good, the bad and the ugly, and everything in-between. For today, we’ve picked out five tools that will hopefully help you in your SEO and online marketing challenges, selected because they’re each practical, function well and cost nothing to play with. Beyond these five, you’ll find links to some of the best SEO tools lists online, for your further exploration.

More than a single tool, this is really a suite that offers a variety of SEO checks that you would typically expect from a paid or premium offering, and in many cases, does it just as well or better.

To get started, enter the URL you’d like to test and click ‘Go’ – how’s that for easy to use? About 10 seconds later, you’ll receive a checklist report of SEO items start looking through.

Interspersed with these applications, you’ll find straight-to-the-point guides for adopting a successful SEO mindset. These guides emphasise improving your website’s value proposition, encouraging you to ask questions like: “how can I make my website a point of competitive differentiation for my brand? How can I help create a resource that Google and other search engines will want to rank?”, which is the right way to be thinking about modern SEO.

Really like this one, but first, a quick thanks to Kelvin Newman for bringing this to my attention on the Internet Marketing Podcast by SiteVisibility. This is one of the easiest and most effective ways to uncover the questions people are asking Google. Simply input a keyword relating to your products or services, select a Google property (options are UK, AU, US, FRANCE and Germany) and click the Get Questions button. Answerthepublic.com will then create tables and diagrams of questions around your keyword, imported from Google search suggestions.

If you’ve used keyword research tools like Ubersuggest.org before, this is quite similar – just focused around questions, which would be particularly handy when planning your content marketing strategy.

SiteLiner is one of the fastest ways to find duplicate content within your website. Starting at the URL you provide it, Siteliner will crawl each page and flag any potential duplicate content issues, highlighting the text it’s found while intelligently excluding items like menus and navigation. When it’s done, you can inspect URLs case by case within the SiteLiner browser, and download summary PDF and CSV files – perfect!

NerdyData is a search engine for code elements, which makes it a brilliant tool for finding implementations of specialty markup ‘in the wild’. Unlike a the traditional search engine which is focused on the content of a webpage, NerdyData digs into the HTML, CSS and Javascript trawling for matches to what you’re looking for. “We find what other search engines can’t” is their tagline, and it does.

A practical example of when Nerdy Data has come in handy for us was inspecting the implementation of hreflang tags. We wanted to find a wide variety of examples of hreflang in practice and were able to locate dozens of cases in a minute or two. Brilliant!

Technically, this is more of a ‘social’ tool but I want to include it here as understanding who your social media influencers are should be part of your SEO strategy. With this tool, you can input a twitter handle such as a person or a company, and using the Twitter API, the tool will create clickable mention maps based on connections and hash tags. You’ll be able to see the social circles of the person or company online, which could be useful for items like finding journalists, bloggers, or seeing who your competitors are conversing with.

Well, that about wraps us up for now. I hope you enjoy these tools and are able to get something useful out of each. If you have any additional SEO tool suggestions for this list, please feel free to share in the comments.